I am catching up on various emails and tasks that I have been ignoring for the past few weeks.
I opened my diary (an actual physical book, not Outlook) and the silver ribbon is firmly stuck in the week of Wednesday 22nd May. Nothing has been written in it since then.
That was a good week. I was just back from a gorgeous few days walking a teeny tiny bit of the Camino de Santiago in Spain with two mighty women. This had been preceded by a fantastic 24 hours in Madrid with another raft of fabulous females, which had come just after the Medical Women's Federation conference in Cambridge where I met loads of lovely people.
I had been showered with gifts and cakes from work colleagues, as I prepared to do a little job-crafting and switch back to more GP-ing and less laptopping.
Life was good and I was in control.
Funny how the scanxiety that plagued me for years had miraculously disappeared, and I had almost forgotten the CT that I had had two weeks before. I tootled into my oncologist's office with absolutely zero expectation of anything other than a nice catch-up and a natter about our mutual areas of interest.
I couldn't figure out why he looked so bothered in himself. Must have had a rough clinic, I supposed; a family of 4 had gone in before me, and that is never good. Still though, he usually perks up when I come in, because he gets to show me my scans from November 2014 and compare them with now and we both applaud the wondrousness of the miracle that is my recovery.
This time, though, he didn't show me the old scan. He showed me the new one. He started talking about my liver, and saying words like "unfortunately" and "sorry". He still wasn't smiling. My brain began to make a bolt for the door. I realised I couldn't follow after it. I had to stay and nod and agree and pretend I was fully engaged with this fascinating conversation, which was clearly about someone else. Poor divil had got me confused with another non-miracle patient. He thought I was a person who had to have chemotherapy again, but sure of course that wasn't true.
Well, clever clogses, you guessed it. It was of course true. It was me, my liver, up on that screen, with a blob of stuff in it that shouldn't be there. It needed to be doused in toxic gack, soused and marinated and drowned in nuclear waste until it accepted its fate (again) and scuttled back into its little corner.
Trouble is, the rest of me gets soused and doused and marinated too. And even though I had only vague memories of what that was like, I knew that it was going to put a very large spanner in the exciting works I had planned for myself. I had to slam into a sharp reverse on my route to the next stage of my career. I had to let people down, and ask for favours and forgiveness. I had to tell my family that their summer would be spent looking at bleeding pustules on my face, while I veered from steroid madness to abject fatigue.
But onwards and upwards. None of this is new, or surprising. There was always going to be a day when I would have to deal with this again. At least now I know when that day is.
It's today.
I put it in my diary.
